Vapochill PE

Deep inside the Fortress of Solitude, John Gillooly unearths the joy of a frozen CPU.

If you’re one of the many that cringe at the thought of spending over $100 of your hard-earned dollars on a heatsink fan for your CPU, then prepare to be even more stupefied at the cost for extreme cooling. However, for those who love performance whatever the price, then the Vapochill PE is poised as the solution most likely to have you waking up at night sweating and thinking about wasted gigahertz.

At its heart, the Vapochill PE is one of the world’s most expensive CPU coolers. There are three major components to the Vapochill PE; a custom-built case made out of galvanised iron; a special circuit board called a ChillControl, and a refrigerator compressor that drives the cooling block that mounts onto the CPU. Unlike the cases with integrated liquid cooling that have passed through the labs in the past, the Vapochill series of cases focus purely on dropping the CPU temperature to below zero and ignores the other componentry.

It has been over a year since the previous model of Vapochill passed through the Atomic Labs. Since then, there have been some significant changes in the design and efficiency of the Vapochill cases, all for the better. The case is a work of industrial art. Rather than go for fancy Aluminium designs, or taking the pre-modded route, designer Asetek has instead created a big, solid, simple beast. It is made out of galvanised iron, largely to provide the strength needed for the top-mounted compressor unit. It happily fits even the bigger ATX motherboard, and can cope easily with those pesky full length GeForce4 Ti4600 video cards that have been a pain in the arse for anyone with a fiddly case. There are five internal 3.5in drive bay, one 3.5in bay designed to accommodate a floppy drive and three 5.25in drive bays. The power supply mounts on its side over the cooling block, which allows the top section to be purely dedicated to housing the compressor. All internal edges are nicely rolled and the whole case gives off an aura of being able to survive a nuclear holocaust intact. The final part of the internals is a simple removable motherboard tray, which is incredibly useful for getting access to the motherboard so you can prepare your CPU for the sub-zero temperatures that it is about to encounter.

Sitting above the circuitry is a 12V Danfoss compressor, which is the main differentiator between the standard Vapochill SE model and the high end Vapochill PE model that we have tested. This compressor is designed to keep a CPU at -15 Celsius under load and -25 Celsius when idle. This drives a cooling block that mounts to the CPU socket using different methods for Socket A and Socket 478 CPUs -- we looked at both kit types.

Mounting the cooling block takes some preparation (all logically explained in the manual) to avoid the terrifying concept of condensation occurring and shorting out your expensive system. This largely revolves around smearing thermal conduction compound over anything metallic on the CPU and socket, packing the inside of the socket with foam rubber and then attaching a small heater over the pins of the CPU to stop them from freezing when the cooling block is working. The process is relatively simple, and apart from a tendency to end the process with hands smeared in nicely toxic thermal goop, it could even be called fun.

Interfacing between the case and the cooling is the brain of the Vapochill, the ChillControl. This unit is programmable via a bootable floppy disk and a serial connection and handles heat monitoring and management functions for the case. It also intercepts the main power supply to the motherboard, not allowing the system to boot until the compressor is up to speed and down to -5 degrees Celsius. This reduces any concerns about thermal damage being done to the CPU while the cooling system gets up to speed.

Our testing of the Vapochill unit shows that it happily lives up to the temperature claims made about it (of course the sealing of the CPU socket means that under-CPU temperature probes will be completely useless). Our Athlon XP 1800+ CPUs have the overclocking headroom of a small piece of damp newspaper, so we turned to the hallowed Atomic 1.6A GHz Northwood Pentium 4. We had gotten the 1.6A running stable and happy at 2.4GHz with air cooling, but here was our chance to get that 1GHz overclock out of it. After preparing the socket and firing the Vapochill PE up we managed to get the 1.6A running rock solid at 2.66GHz, running on a 166MHz FSB. With the appearance of the new C1-stepping Pentium 4s, the chance of getting similar monstrous overclocks is fairly high and the Vapochill PE is the perfect complement.

In the end, performance is going to depend on both the motherboard you use and the luck you have finding an overclockable CPU. But with the Vapochill you can rest assured that when you do find these things, it will give some of the best possible cooling performance and allow you to squeeze more out of your processor than any other desktop cooling solution on the market today. There are currently no Australian distributors for the Vapochill case, but they are readily available online and from some specialty case modding stores.

Asetek has really scored well with the Vapochill PE. Despite price drops from the previous generation it is still a very expensive option for cooling. But if you have a love of overclocking and an attention span longer than the 10 minutes of freakish performance that liquid nitrogen gives then the Vapochill is a saviour.